Last night Rachelle and I watched the documentary Bill Cunningham New York.
It’s an excellent movie that follows New York fashion photographer Bill Cunningham as he chronicles the life that flows through the city. It’s all fashion-based, of course, but it’s done with an artist’s mandate rather than a commercial one, capturing the life of fashion as it blossoms and exists in the natural world of Manhattan, instead of the aggressively polished images shilling at us from billboards and magazines.
Cunningham has been a fixture at the New York Times since 1978, where he’s been publishing his now famous “On The Street” and “Evening Hours” photo essays. In his early 80’s, Cunningham is all nervous energy, practically distracted, somehow reminding me of a combination of David Byrne and somebody’s antic grandmother. Unlike most celebrated Manhattanites, Cunningham lives an utterly monastic life, eschewing not just the trappings of the industry, but many of the amenities that most of us in the modern world would consider normal, even essential. For instance, he sleeps on a cot surrounded by filing cabinets, rides a bicycle everywhere and has never had a romantic relationship.
As far as these things can be superficially gleaned, one would think that Bill Cunningham was a gay man. With great sensitivity the director of the film(Richard Press) asked about his personal life, which Cunningham correctly took to mean, “Are you gay?” His answer was really neither an avowal nor a refutation, but more of an unwillingness to accept the existence of such a category. He didn’t mean that he was unwilling to accept the relevance or validity of dividing people into sexual categories, but that where he came from, a working-class, Roman Catholic environment, there was no such thing as homosexuality.
It wasn’t spoken about.
It’s existence was, essentially, denied, and so you can imagine Bill Cunningham coming of age in the late 1940’s, denying the possibility of the person he might in fact be.
The only other thing, besides obsessively documenting the evolution of fashion, that Cunningham seemed to do was attend church each Sunday. The director asked him about this, too, and Cunningham welled-up, had to compose himself and lost the ability to clearly articulate his thoughts. Religion was a big part of him, but he couldn’t say why, exactly, and we could see in there a complicated tangle of sexuality and religious disapproval, a place where the man himself might have been squeezed out into a kind of oblivion.
In a different time, somebody like Cunningham might be considered a saint. He is single-minded and egalitarian, having completely given his life over to fashion in an utterly pure, even manic way, pushing aside all other branches of the human experience. His story isn’t exactly a sad one, for he seems so sparked, so alive within his passion, that one doesn’t feel sorry for him, but still an aura of melancholy, of loss, really, enshrines him like a halo.
All of this puts in mind a video I came across today of an interview with John Shelby Spong that I hope you might take the time to watch:
www.youtube.com/watch